Chain-of-thought prompting, by including intermediate reasoning steps in few-shot examples, elicits strong reasoning abilities in large language models on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic tasks.
super hub Canonical reference
Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models
Canonical reference. 83% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
651
Pith papers citing it
Background
83% of classified citations
abstract
We study empirical scaling laws for language model performance on the cross-entropy loss. The loss scales as a power-law with model size, dataset size, and the amount of compute used for training, with some trends spanning more than seven orders of magnitude. Other architectural details such as network width or depth have minimal effects within a wide range. Simple equations govern the dependence of overfitting on model/dataset size and the dependence of training speed on model size. These relationships allow us to determine the optimal allocation of a fixed compute budget. Larger models are significantly more sample-efficient, such that optimally compute-efficient training involves training very large models on a relatively modest amount of data and stopping significantly before convergence.
hub tools
citation-role summary
background 119
method 6
dataset 3
baseline 2
other 2
citation-polarity summary
claims ledger
- abstract We study empirical scaling laws for language model performance on the cross-entropy loss. The loss scales as a power-law with model size, dataset size, and the amount of compute used for training, with some trends spanning more than seven orders of magnitude. Other architectural details such as network width or depth have minimal effects within a wide range. Simple equations govern the dependence of overfitting on model/dataset size and the dependence of training speed on model size. These relationships allow us to determine the optimal allocation of a fixed compute budget. Larger models are s
authors
co-cited works
representative citing papers
BBO-Pile is the first large-scale open dataset of real optimization trajectories used to train and scale foundation models that imitate black-box optimization methods.
Introduces the Synthetic Data Contamination Equilibrium and derives closed-form optimal provenance subsidies s* = KL(q||p)/(2 kappa) plus watermark strengths to mitigate model collapse, validated by OLS matching structural predictions on C4 data.
Cayley unitary adapters executed on real quantum hardware improve LLM perplexity by 1.4% on Llama 3.1 8B with 6000 parameters and recover 83% of compression-induced degradation on SmolLM2.
ε-coresets for attention exist of size O(√d e^{ρ+o(ρ)}/ε) for unit-norm keys/values and queries of norm ≤ρ, nearly matching the Ω(√d e^ρ/ε) lower bound.
RoundPipe achieves near-zero-bubble pipeline parallelism for LLM training on consumer GPUs by dynamically dispatching computation stages round-robin, yielding 1.48-2.16x speedups and enabling 235B model fine-tuning on 8x RTX 4090.
Transformer weight spectra exhibit transient compression waves that propagate layer-wise, persistent non-monotonic depth gradients in power-law exponents, and Q/K-V asymmetry, with the spectral exponent alpha predicting layer importance and enabling pruning gains of 1.1x-3.6x over Last-N baselines.
Grokking reflects escape from a metastable low-dimensional regime where transverse curvature accumulates before generalization, with subspace motion necessary but curvature boost insufficient.
The SDE benchmark shows LLMs lag on scientific discovery tasks relative to general science tests, with diminishing scaling returns and shared weaknesses across models.
Transformers perform kernel-based prediction for Hölder regression on manifolds and achieve intrinsic-dimension-dependent minimax rates with sufficient training tasks.
Introduces hybrid noise and novel coupling analysis to achieve the first convergent hidden-state DP bound for zeroth-order optimization.
LLaDA is a scalable diffusion-based language model that matches autoregressive LLMs like LLaMA3 8B on tasks and surpasses GPT-4o on reversal poem completion.
ErrorRadar is a new benchmark of 2,500 multimodal K-12 math problems for MLLM error step identification and categorization, where GPT-4o trails human experts by ~10%.
TTT layers treat the hidden state as a trainable model updated at test time, allowing linear-complexity sequence models to scale perplexity reduction with context length unlike Mamba.
KANs with learnable univariate spline activations on edges achieve better accuracy than MLPs with fewer parameters, faster scaling, and direct visualization for scientific discovery.
Tiny language models under 10M parameters trained on a synthetic children's story dataset generate fluent, consistent, multi-paragraph English text with near-perfect grammar and reasoning.
Pythia releases 16 identically trained LLMs with full checkpoints and data tools to study training dynamics, scaling, memorization, and bias in language models.
Language models can automatically generate high-quality evaluation datasets that reveal new cases of inverse scaling, sycophancy, and concerning goal-seeking behaviors, including some worsened by RLHF.
The Pile is a newly constructed 825 GiB dataset from 22 diverse sources that enables language models to achieve better performance on academic, professional, and cross-domain tasks than models trained on Common Crawl variants.
A compute-aware framework using cumulative FLOPs shows alignment training has non-monotonic effects on robustness and attack costs vary up to 5x across harm categories.
A novel complexity minimization meta-learning framework provably demonstrates that few-shot adaptation error decreases as meta-training data volume increases.
PrefixMem encoder for Semantic IDs improves deepest-level accuracy by up to 46% relative and full-SID retrieval recall by up to 22% relative on Pinterest data across LLM families.
D³ introduces a dynamic directional graph-constrained framework that models sample interactions via loss dependencies to derive an optimized training sequence for LLMs.
The study links three LVLM architectural dimensions to three hallucination types via a new benchmark, finding that language foundation quality reduces co-occurrence errors, visual encoder strength reduces similarity errors, alignment reduces uncertainty errors, and joint visual-alignment improvement
citing papers explorer
-
Provable Data Scaling Law for Meta Learning via Complexity Minimization
A novel complexity minimization meta-learning framework provably demonstrates that few-shot adaptation error decreases as meta-training data volume increases.
-
Uniform-in-Time Weak Propagation-of-Chaos in Shallow Neural Networks
Finite-width shallow networks remain within poly(d) m^{-min(1,c/6)} of their mean-field limit uniformly in time when mean-field excess loss decays as t^{-c} under standard regularity and an integral condition on the loss.
-
Uniform Scaling Limits in AdamW-Trained Transformers
AdamW-trained transformer hidden states and backpropagated variables converge uniformly in L2 to a forward-backward ODE system (McKean-Vlasov when non-causal) at rate O(L^{-1}+L^{-1/3}H^{-1/2}) as depth L and heads H increase, with bounds independent of token number.
-
Sharp feature-learning transitions and Bayes-optimal neural scaling laws in extensive-width networks
In extensive-width networks, features are recovered sequentially through sharp phase transitions, yielding an effective width k_c that unifies Bayes-optimal generalization error scaling as Θ(k_c d / n).
-
High-Dimensional Private Linear Regression with Optimal Rates
DP-GD achieves minimax optimal non-asymptotic risk O(γ + γ²/ρ²) for well-conditioned high-dimensional data and power-law scaling for ill-conditioned power-law spectra, with the exponent depending on the privacy parameter ρ.
-
An Interpretable and Scalable Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models
A majorization-minimization framework turns IRT into scalable matrix factorization subproblems for LLM evaluation, delivering orders-of-magnitude speedups with identifiability guarantees.
-
Perturbation is All You Need for Extrapolating Language Models
Perturbing prefixes to semantic neighbors during training creates a hierarchical noise model that improves language model predictions on token sequences outside the training corpus support.
-
Scaling and renormalization in high-dimensional regression
Ridge regression in high dimensions exhibits power-law scalings because covariance fluctuations renormalize the ridge parameter, allowing closed-form error expressions and bias-variance decompositions for random feature models via free probability.
-
Asymmetric Scaling Laws from Sparse Features
A sparse-activation model predicts double-descent loss with distinct under- and over-parameterized scaling exponents set by sparsity, plus a compute-optimal frontier favoring dataset growth.
-
Position: Prioritize Identifying Structure, Not Complex Models, for Scientific Discovery
Mechanistic learning from ML is generically underdetermined in high-dimensional proxy regimes, with LLMs worsening the problem by collapsing many possible explanations into one fluent narrative.
- Scalable Reinforcement Learning via Adaptive Batch Scaling